


the scenes which hold the waking world

by roachpatrol



Series: Sleepsong [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, F/M, M/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Sibling Incest, Troll Romance, Trollstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 05:39:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1676741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She straightens up and catches him staring. Daevit knows his poker face is as solid as any bar of steel but still he can feel his horns dipping forward, just a little, stupid skitterbug hindbrain with a mind of its own. She just smiles like he couldn’t take her with an army.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the scenes which hold the waking world

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to manyblinkinglights and rainbowbarnacle for editing and encouragement. 
> 
> *
> 
>  
> 
> _Oh, in the strangest dreams, walking by your side_  
>  _It is the hole you impose upon your life_  
>  _When you're out, loneliness, it crawls up in the ground_  
>  _It's what you feel, but can't articulate out loud_
> 
>  
> 
> Bastille - _Sleepsong_
> 
> *

The girl that stops at the street corner across from Daevit’s little square of cardboard seems like the set up to a truly gut-busting joke, but he’s damned if he can figure out the punchline. There she is, a seadweller in the city, head and horns taller than even the midbloods hurrying along the narrow paths between the hivestems, taking a fiddle—a fucking _fiddle_ —out of its case with every apparent intention of playing it. 

Daevit studies her from behind his shades, hands still dancing light and mean across his hive-made acoustic sound-mixing huskpad device, passers-by still dropping the occasional beetle or caegar or mealstub into his ironically unwearable hat. She’s pretty, in that obnoxious movie-star way all seadwellers are pretty—in that way he’s more than a little kinked for—and he can tell from the set of her fins that she’s listening to him. He slows the beat down, stutters it, and presses: _“All grown ups are p-p-pirates,”_ blares, and he cuts in the opening theme from the most recent nautical-themed piece of Trollywood garbage. He thinks he sees a flash of fang from those dark lips, and then the girl straightens up and tucks that ludicrously lowblood acoustic stringed device beneath her regal chin. 

He has time to catch the flash of violet iris to his hindbrain before her eyelashes sweep down and she draws her bow across the strings. It’s the reprise of that fucking tune, of all things, from the part where the rustblood sacrifices himself for his highblood moirail and he thinks _oh you fucking did NOT_ and then his hands are moving, speeding up the beat she’s timing herself to, forcing her to play faster or grate against him. This is his set, his stoop, Daevit Stride does not do pathos, Disc Joker Turntech has no time for sad shit. 

She counters, though, reels off into a tune he’s never heard before, slow and high and spooky, a whalesong howl that mixes with his electronica crackle in a way that sends creeps straight up his vertebral stack, sends him scrambling for a sample that’ll tame it somehow, twist it back into a sound he can deal with. He’s never heard a lowblood wrangle a fiddle like _that_ before and he thinks _fucking highbloods_ before there’s no more time for thought, just the thrust and feint of the music. 

She’s good: not just some rich kid dicking around with a chunk of wood and wire for a laugh, but _good_. She knows how to play, for all it’s like nothing he’s ever heard. They weave together some choice-ass noise and standing outside of himself Daevit can objectively say that this is the best he’s ever played, spurred on and sizzling with nerves and a rising, heady indignation. How fucking dare she? How fucking dare this girl show up and try to school him. His fingers fly across the keys and he can feel the music pulsing in his horns, writhing between them both as they vie for control. 

She draws her bow up into a shriek like the last desperate cry of a dying thing, and he cuts his sound cold and lets that unreal note just hang. It fades slowly and Daevit realizes that he’s fangs-bared and gasping for breath, sweat-sticky from aggression. People are applauding, whistling some, tossing him tribute, and he doesn’t quite dare look at the seadweller girl straight on. She’s tucked her improbable instrument away and is gathering the thrown value-tokens up in her long black skirt. He can see a flash of one slim silver ankle, and the pulse of heat it sends up through his throat makes him feel filthy. 

He makes a big show of cleaning out his keys while she gets herself situated, polishing the chitin with the hem of his shirt while people mill around and punch him congratulatingly in the shoulder. She crosses the street. 

“Good game,” she says, and heat floods his ears. He wants to say _you too_ , or _ask for my handle god please ask for my handle_ or just _why?_. Instead he shrugs, insouciant unflappable gutterblood coolkid with his ass planted neatly on the curb like he’s king of his own little cardboard kingdom. 

He says, “Oh, you know.” He says, “No biggie.”

She pours her skirtful of cash into his cap, a neat clattering stream. He can tell without having to look that she’s made as much with that one set as he’s made all night, and that she’s only giving it to him so that he _knows_ it. He’s not sure if that means she’s won, or that it was a tie, or what. 

“Maybe I’ll see you around,” she says.

He presses the button on his huskpad that makes a fart noise, and she has the most beautiful laugh he’s ever heard. 

*

He gets to the transit station before the heat builds up too far to ignore and he ducks into the nearest waste chamber, shuts himself up in a stall and fumbles for the clasp of his jeans. His bone bulge is already dilated wide and wet and the deep rust curl of his stalk piles out in a liquid rush when he gets his fingers down there, shit, he didn’t even wash his hands after sorting all his takings, he’s practically begging for an infection and he doesn’t care. He gets his jeans down and straddles the load gaper, horns set hard against the wall, and he grinds them forward as he slips two, three fingers into his sopping nook. She had long horns, long and straight, and he imagines the cool tile touching his forehead is her own forehead and he draws back a little, butts the wall again hard. It’s all he can do to gulp down a chirp at the shock of impact that sizzles from his horns down to his nook, and he can’t stifle the needy whining buzz coming out of his throat at all, not for a million caegars and a high-five from the Empress herself. 

He squeezes his bulge, pumps up quick and sharp into his nook and climax takes him just like that, like a mugging. He whimpers “ _Oh_ ,” and spills, “oh, god,” and finds himself nuzzling the cold tile, dazed and tingling and faintly humiliated.

He cleans himself up with fistfuls of cellulose tissue and hangs his ruined briefs from the sink’s faucet as a gift for some lucky pervert or unlucky janiterritorialist. He doesn’t remember much of the trip back home—not till he gets through the hive portal Sollux looks up from his programming nest and frowns at him does the world cool down and stop spinning. 

“If you leak tears, sweat, or hobo juice on any of my rigs I will end you,” he says, because halfassed douchery is how Sollux expresses concern. Daevit trudges over to flop across his moirail’s keyboard like a gross and spiteful mewbeast. 

“Hey,” Sollux says, and wiggles Daevit’s head by the horn. “Hey, what’s up.”

“Just some highblood weirded me out tonight,” Daevit says. “It’s nothing. It’s stupid.”

“Well, you’re stupid,” Sollux says, but he bundles him up against his chest, sweat and public transit grease and all, and lets him chill there while he gets back to programming. 

 

*

It’s a perigee later when Daevit sees the girl again, and he’s so surprised that he misses his step. The dance station trills “You fucked up!” obnoxiously bright and smug. His opponent barks out a breathless laugh and racks up a combo with three nicely timed stomps and a spin. Daevit curses and throws himself back into the game, hitting the pads just a hair more perfectly each time, and they finish the song out with Daevit respectably in the lead. 

The dance station spits Daevit’s caegar back out and his opponent scowls, tosses his horns, stuffs his hands in his pockets, hops down. If you’re good you can play all morning on one caegar, and Daevit’s very good. 

Daevit turns around to see who his next challenger for dance station supremacy is, and this time he’s completely unsurprised to see the seadweller cutting through the crowd like something sharp through another something smart enough not to get in the fucking way of a seadweller and what they want. 

“Who’s next,” he drawls, looking anywhere but her, but she swings up onto the platform anyway, and brushes the long dark sweep of her skirt smooth. He wonders if she takes it off to swim so she doesn’t get tangled up in it, then tries pretty hard to stop wondering that.

“Hi,” she says. 

“Hey,” he says. He doesn’t ask her name, or ask her if she wears that long black skirt into the water, or ask what the fuck it means that they’ve met a second time, if she’s into him or whatever, if she thinks he’s an easy fuck or a street trophy or a charity case. He just puts his caegar back into the coin slot, and she puts a much, much shinier coin into hers. 

He loses. 

Daevit Stride is not a modest guy and Daevit Stride will tell you that he is _good_ at dancing. He knows rhythm; rhythm is his broke-heeled female barkbeast and he can work it, he can put his paws exactly where they need to go on a dance floor the same way he can move his grasp digits exactly where they need to go on a music board: exactly when they need to be.

This girl gets there just a little before that. 

He loses. By a single point, but he loses. The last time he lost a guy had jammed an arm-hinge into his thoracic superstructure and he’d stumbled off the platform and people had hissed and jeered. Shoving your opponent’s a bone-panned move, no flair to it. Might makes right, sure, but it sure as hell don’t make style. 

This seadweller chick has _style_ , and Daevit Stride loses. By a single point. 

He leans back against the platform delineation bar and tries not to look as utterly winded as he is, or like he’s giving serious thought to trying to claw his opponent’s face straight off. And then maybe slip what’s left some tongue—no. No. He’s just, he’s pissed. He’s just absolutely fucking pissed, and she’s not even breathing hard, though her fins are flared wide as fans and beads of sweat stand out against her temples like gemstones, though he can’t help but see the slide of one screen-lit drop streak down her long thin throat, soak the high neckline of her dress. She folds her fins and stoops to collect her caegar in a beautiful motion, beautiful the way she had been when she was dancing against him: perfect economy. Her hand reaches the slot before the caegar does, and the coin rolls out neatly into the little extra fold of webbing seadwellers have between their first two knuckles. 

She straightens up and catches him staring. Daevit knows his poker face is as solid as any bar of steel but still he can feel his horns dipping forward, just a little, stupid skitterbug hindbrain with a mind of its own. She just smiles like he couldn’t take her with an army. 

“Good game,” she says, and he knows if she gives him the caegar he will die trying to kill her. Instead she steps off the platform, as lightly as she might move underwater, as if gravity is something she only barely humors, and treads over to the nearest vending apparatus. She spends her caegar on a squeeze-beetle of apple juice, and Daevit only realizes then that he’s been dancing for hours, against one kid or another, that his head’s throbbing with dehydration and his knees feel like someone stole them, he is actually literally dripping with sweat and probably smells like he died thirteen levels back.

She drinks, her fins splaying out just a little with the clutch of her throat, bared to the crowd like she knows none of them could take her, ever, any of them—and no one tries, though Daevit knows he’s not the only one calculating angles of attack. It still comes as a surprise when she breaks off and throws the beetle straight at his face, a vicious singing overhand that sends it smacking into his hastily-raised palm. 

There’s half the portion of juice still left in the beetle, and a smear of glossy purple-black lipstick on the nozzle. Daevit sticks it in his mouth without haste or hesitation and drains the rest, head tossed back, the taste of over-sweet apples secondary to the tang of wax and salt.  
She smiles, wide and pretty—happy, _god_ , he wants—that, forever, that smile, just that—and then she’s turning away, walking back out of the arcade still with that improbably light step, almost floating, the hem of her long black skirt trailing out behind like a splash of ink. 

He’s still holding the squeeze-beetle, clutching it to his breast like a lady’s favor. 

“ _Damn_ ,” someone says fervently, and Daevit doesn’t feel any better knowing he’s not the only kid hung up on that girl’s ankles, and throat, and maybe kind of everything else besides. He feels kind of like gutting everyone who was looking at her too, and then maybe dying. His bulge is one perilous breath from letting everyone know he’s a wiggler who creams himself over the least little scrap of pitch attention and he doesn’t think about the taste of her lipstick, he doesn’t. He doesn’t. 

“Who’s next,” he says, going to climb back up onto the platform, but the crowd’s quiet. 

“Who’s _next_ ,” Daevit repeats, spreading his arms out. “Come on, guys. Someone give me a real fight.”

“You just got within one point of tying with a precognitive seadweller, Turntech,” someone finally says. “Get that tight little magic ass of yours off the platform and let us mortals have a go, yeah?” and everyone else murmurs assent, and shuffles their feet, and won’t look him in the eye. 

No one plays against him for the rest of the morning. He goes home, finally, aching bitterly all up his legs and between them.

“What is it with me and seadwellers,” he wants to know, leaning on his elbows. “Like, I mean, what. Seriously, what. Do I just have _Hi hello please fuck with this chump_ written on me in ultraviolet ink?”

Sollux rolls over blearily in the slime. 

“You didn’t,” he moans. 

Daevit climbs into the recuperacoon, and lets Sollux flop unhappily against him and give him a sticky noogie. 

“I didn’t,” he says quietly, batting his moirail’s hands away. “It’s cool. I didn’t.” He expects to feel proud of himself. 

He doesn’t.

 

*

He doesn’t see the girl again for weeks, until he admits he’s looking for her, until he gives up looking for her, until he manages to jerk off to something besides the thought of her closing in above him. Then late one night he walks out of a teliaria with a greasy paper sack of deep fried don’t-ask-what and she takes the bag neatly out of his claws. 

“These are bad for you,” she says, scolding almost, but her mouth’s turned up in a little smile.

“I like to live dangerously,” he drawls. 

She fishes—ha!—a lump out of the bag, and pops it between a set of gorgeously even fangs. She doesn’t chew: her fins stretch and fold back as she swallows it whole. 

“There’s dangerous and then there’s suicidal,” she says, still _chiding_ , like they’re moirails, like he’s going to be highblood armcandy for the rest of his short, stupid life: but that little quirk to her greasy lips, and the wicked gleam in her purple eyes. He’s pretty sure if he makes a grab for the bag she will hold it above his head, and then he will have to go die from the ensuing rage-boner. He’s entirely sure she wants him to try. 

So he does: he grabs for it and she pulls her arm up and then he grabs _her_ and climbs right up, like he’s thought about for way too many days now, his thighs around her hips, his nose brushing the bright gill coverts tucked beneath her jaw and she goes still and her throat works around a gasp. Her breath smells like nasty deep-fried bullshit and with her face tilted down towards him, startled-open, their horns click. She wants him. He doesn’t know why and he doesn’t know how, but she does.

“Suicidal, then, to—to interpose yourself so between a denizen of the furthest deeps and her chosen comestible,” she says hoarsely, and their noses brush together. He can almost taste her lipstick. 

The things he knows about seadwellers—the things he knows about _suicide_ —and none of it matter, not anymore, not since he’s met her. He takes the bag from her wavering hand. 

“I’d say ‘bite me, bitch’, but we both know you couldn’t touch this with a fucking net,” he says as steadily as he can, and then books it. 

She’s after him in a flash, of course—of course—but he knows this part of town, and smaller trolls corner a hell of a lot better than big crazy broads in long skirts. He ducks into a low, cluttered tunnel of alley and when he hears a crash and a curse he can’t help cackling out loud.  
When he gets to the dead end of the alley and vaults a dumpster to make it to the top of the crumbling wall, cold hands catch his wrists and swing him up. He can’t believe it but he _can_ , though, there she is with a grin like a slice of white hell waiting for him, and she snaps the bag out of his hand. 

“Hey!” he yelps. 

“Hay is for hoofbeasts,” she grins. “These are for me.” And she pulls out another treat and munches it, smirking.

Daevit pushes her, because the only alternative is kissing and—not yet, too soon. The chase is the thing, the game, the only ultimate sport and some sick twisted-up part of him’s been _longing_ for this, the primal exhilarated terror of a hopbeast before the hounds, the lowblood against the high. She falls straight backwards and then _twists_ in midair, landing with a neat bounce on her feet and trotting off down the concourse. By the time Daevit’s made it off the wall himself she’s turned a corner and by the time he’s gotten around that she’s running flat out through traffic, two tall horns and a whipping banner of a skirt plowing through the swerving scuttlebugs and panicking riding beasts. She leaves a maelstrom of hooves and claws and spinning wheels in her wake, sheer suicide. Daevit plunges in anyway, because what the fuck else is he going to do? There she is, so here he follows.

He catches up with her in three streets, scuffed and sweaty, and tackles her hard against the wall. Never a foot out of place, Turntech, never a hair, but for this girl he got kicked in the fucking head. 

She kisses him, then. Before he can even snarl, her cool iron arms gather him up tight and she kisses him like she wants to lose her tongue in his tonsils. 

“God,” he chirps, “oh, _God_ —” utterly relieved, the grease slide of lipstick and fryer oil mingling together against his lips. He doesn’t even know her name. Instead, he kisses back till there’s blood in the mix. 

Someone whistles, then, sharp and mocking, and the girl jolts and breaks away and drops him. If she’s _ashamed_ of him he’s going to die of fury and also sexual frustration, but when she looks down at him there’s no contempt in her eyes, just hunger, held back by—what? She brushes his sweaty hair back from his forehead, brushes her thumb across the abrasion. Daevit’s mouth is very dry, for a dude who just got fucking frenched half to death. His nook’s pretty much tied itself in a knot with impatience. This isn’t pale, he felt her bulge—if this is pale he will go home and get Sollux to put a hole through his damn fool head— _she_ kissed _him_ first, so, what, then?

Instead of jizzing himself or asking what the hell she thinks she’s doing—asking her name—he stoops, grabs the dropped bag of deep fry. He tucks it under his arm and takes a big step back.  
“Look at that,” he rasps. “Guess you’ll have to put something else in your mouth.” He grabs a handful of his crotch, leers. “You open to suggestions?”

She laughs, then, bright and cawing, and lunges. He runs. 

They play tag. It’s absurd, a wiggler’s game, _catch me if you can_ : but they do catch, every time, till the bag is pulp, till the bag is ripped half a dozen times over, they’re grabbing and trading off a sweat-wet scrap of paper in between breathless kisses. Daevit’s mouth is burning when he’s caught the final time, burning all into his lungs and down his legs, and his knees finally buckle when he makes it up a rickety stairwell and finds her, again, waiting for him. She catches him up again, swinging him around and down to sit with him at the top step. They pant together, thighs pressed together, shoulders shaking with exhaustion. 

“I missed you,” the girl says, startling him. He looks up at her and she’s smiling, wry and toothy, and he smiles back. 

“Missed you too,” he admits. 

When she takes his chin and kisses him again this time it’s sweet and slow, and his bloodpump hammers hard inside him. He coos and hooks a leg over her thigh, pressing closer, slipping a hand up her shirt. She shivers when he brushes over the stiff damp lines of what have to be gills, and then he gets a handful of boob and she coos against his tongue. He kneads it and she goes soft against him, all that steel-corded seadweller strength rendering down into something terribly vulnerable and wanting. He shifts to straddle one of her legs, his knee pressing up against her nook and his fingers fist in her hair. He can feel her shivering everywhere they’re touching, feel her low crooning call dancing along his bones as she fumbles with the button of his jeans. God, God, she’s beautiful. 

“Dave,” she keens. “Fuck, _Dave_ , more—” and he jerks back like she punched him. 

Exactly like that.

“Daevit,” she says, “ _Daevit_.” Too late. He’s frozen up. He’s ice all through.

“Dave,” he repeats, that weird flat name like a mouthful of acid. Nothing like his name, nothing like anything that could even be a nickname, all the tones wrong, the consonants mangled out of shape. _Dave_. 

“I—I meant,” she says, “ _you’re_ —” and he scrambles off her so abruptly he almost falls, ripping away from her hands. He can feel his eyes prickling with rage and shame. 

“Don’t,” he says, as evenly as he can. “Don’t you lie to me. Don’t you dare tell me you weren’t thinking of someone else just now. Don’t you tell me you actually think I’m that stupid.”

And the worst thing is she doesn’t. She just sits there on the step with all the light gone out of her eyes, and she looks so empty and sad. 

“Daevit,” she says, and she says it like she hates herself instead of him. 

He does up his pants and he turns around and he walks away, goes down step by step, hands wrapped tight around each opposite elbow. 

 

*

He doesn’t look for her. He _doesn’t_. He’s done with the part of his life where he thinks he can fix anything for anyone, or be anything but what he is: Daevit Stride, runty pointless rustblood jackass, only good at failing to be who people would rather have instead. He eats food that tastes like shit and he plays music that sounds like shit, and he sleeps like shit, and he acts like a shit to his moirail who puts up with his shit like a shithead. His dreams are all blood and fire, and cold hands. It’s insane, this sadness, this lingering fucked up sense of loss that doesn’t lessen. It wasn’t even like they had a relationship to break up over. They didn’t have a goddamn thing. 

He doesn’t look for her. He doesn’t have to. She busks the same corner every evening, anyway, walks back to the same squat. Everyone says, everyone knows, everyone’s talking about it, the funny quiet highblood girl come down from the coast to slum it with humble hivestem rabble, and whatever could she want? And whoever is it that she’s waiting for? They look at Daevit, and Daevit—he doesn’t look at much of anything. He gets real good at changing the fucking subject.

He clears out of that part of town, instead, surrenders the territory. Tightens his belt. Squares his shoulders. Plays till his fingers ache worse than his heart, till his head is heavy enough that he sinks into the slime dreamless. Ignores his moirail until—confused, resigned—his moirail starts ignoring him back. He jerks it to fluff porn, sweet red boys in ribbons kissing their wigglerhood pals, shopping for curtains, whatever, he doesn’t stick his fingers up his nook thinking of her cold hands, he doesn’t. 

He finds a piece of paper in his hat, one day. A pipe bomb would have been nicer. 

H3R N4M3 W4S ROS3, it says. SH3 N33DS YOU.

He wants not to know who it’s talking about, but he knows. He finds himself mouthing the word, anyway, the name: Rose, rose. Like the flower? God. Like the thorns. He pockets his earnings, stows his gear. He walks across town. He isn’t looking for her: he knows where she is. 

She opens the door of her squat after the first knock. Her pupils are too wide for this time of morning and her hair is a tangled mess and a bottle of sopor concentrate dangles loosely from one hand. She looks about as fucked up as he feels, which is less satisfying to behold than it should be. 

“So who was he?” he asks. 

She looks at him for a long, awful time, then slumps against the door frame. “A long time ago,” she says, “I had a brother.”

“Oh,” Daevit says, and his heart doesn’t know whether to leap or sink. 

“I sh—still...” she bites her lip in frustration, then says quickly, fiercely, “I dream of him, all the time, every day— ’m fuckin’— _fucking_ haunted by him, this boy from another lifetime, he was half my soul an’ I lost him, he’s gone and he keeps comin’ back so I lose’m all over again ev’r night. Can’t, I can’t rerememember his horns or, or his smile, his _shine_ —” her voice breaks, and she hides her eyes with one hand. “I can’t remember his sign,” she croaks. “I try’n try each time I wake up but I can’t. Please esh—ek—escuse me.”

Daevit catches the door frame before it slams shut, and bulls his way through and into the hall. She looks at him with hazy pain, swaying on her feet. 

“You’re so mush like’im,” she says, and takes a drink.

“I’m not,” he says, furious, smarting all over. “I’m not your fucking brother, I’m not going to _be_ your fucking brother. I’m fucking _done_ with brothers.”

She shrugs a shoulder. “Neverthelesh,” she says, and gestures with the bottle. “Here y’are.”

She looks so sad he wants to kiss her, he wants to spur her sharp and bright again, slap that stupid bottle out of her grip and rattle that hollow distant look out of her dark eyes. Who does he think he’s fooling? He wants to throw a leg over her sleek thighs and take her in a manly fashion. He aches to get her bulge so far up into him it says hello to his back teeth, she’s a seadweller, she could probably manage. 

He wants to hold her hand. 

“I hate you so much,” he says, and his voice shakes. 

She peers down at him, and then throws her head back and drains the bottle. Then she throws it at the wall so hard it shatters. 

“Yeah,” she says, wiping her mouth. “Yeah, okay. Les’ do this.” Then she draws on him, long needles made of something so dark they hurt the eyes. 

It isn’t fun. It isn’t a game, this time, isn’t a contest of wills. It’s something brutal and punishing and deadly. He gets his sword out in time and the force it takes to parry her strikes is unreal, impossible, and she bounces him off the fucking walls. Furniture shatters and crunches underfoot as he’s forced on the defensive and he’s so angry, he’s so angry, he never thought he could be this angry: who the fuck does she think she is? Who the fuck does she think is to have a right to punish him for who he _isn’t_. He hacks and stabs and ruins her skirt, scores her horns, and she spins and glitters and breaks his sword with her needles like it’s nothing, like the metal is candyglass. She grabs him by the horn as he gapes at her and throws him down to the splintery floor. After that it’s down to teeth and claws, and the fight transforms into something primal and desperate. He’s never _screwed_ a seadweller before, no matter how fucked up and intimately violent things got between him and his own brother at least they never went there but now he is, with her, with this girl, and it’s so easy to make the transition. 

“Where’s your brother now, huh?” he snarls, grinding up against her, his claws making hashtags of her gillslits. “You still gonna be waiting for him while you fuck me?”

She rips at his ear with her teeth and hisses “Shut the hell up, _Daevit_ ,” sharply, perfectly, “Or I won’t.” And he does, too, damn him, he shuts up, struck stupid with how much he needs her inside him. He rips at her skirt and grabs her bulge and she bucks up against him, fumbles at his jeans. He pumps the long cold length of her—lengths, shit, fucking seadwellers, the coiling expanding mass of her fronds. She shudders and finally tears the denim off his thighs in shreds. There’s no way he can fit the whole crazy tangle inside him but he sets his knees to bracket her hips, braces his hands on her shoulders and glares her down. 

“Come on,” he hisses, “Come at me.”

“‘S your corpse party,” she says, and shreds off the last sodden scraps of his underwear.  
At the slide of her tendrils against his he has to lock his elbows to keep from collapsing. He chirps and squirms and the sensation keeps coming, compounding, cool and slick around his bulge, sliding against the entrance of his nook and then in. She holds on to his hips and her fingers are so long, her thumbs meet over his bone bulge. He’s left gasping at the relentless stretch of her lengths coiling into him, and she just grins mirthlessly and pulls him down on to her. The tips of her fronds hit the back of his nook and twist ruthlessly into his seedflap and he keens from it, low and stupid and helpless to stop. 

“Need a break?” she asks. Daevit bares his teeth dazedly but it’s hard to concentrate, stuffed like this, rocking against her with her fronds coiling around his hips and against his ass. The fluid from the tendrils she’s not pumping into him is trickling down his thighs—and his fluid, too, is part of the mix. There isn’t a chance of reciprocation like this, so lost in her grip, and it’s so obviously just the way she wants it. 

He thrusts a hand back, down and into the tangle between their legs. Surprise takes over the distracted pleasure on her face, and Daevit works his fingers into the slick tangle and finds—there, an opening. He takes his own bulge in hand and leans back on his heels, looks back to her face. She’s got her lip between her teeth and her grip on his hips is bruising. This fucked up awful thing they have going on isn’t something Daevit wants just to have done to him, or to do to her, it’s—he wants it mutual, and as weird a way she’s looking up at him, as tight as her fingers clench, she doesn’t stop him. 

He squirms and pulls at her, gets one of her legs thrown over his, and presses back forward. The clutch and flutter of her nook is immediately, obviously different than the indifferent slide of her fronds, and this time his elbows do give out. He sprawls ungracefully across her chest, and she presses a terrible soft kiss to one of his horns. It strikes him that this is the first time she’s ever touched them, even in their stupid game of parkour grabass. 

He cups one of her fins. “Rose,” he says, softly, and then chokes as her claws dig into his skin, as the shiver that goes through her rolls her up hard against him. 

“Fuck,” she gasps, “Fuck, fuck— _Daevit_ —”

“Rose,” he says again, and grinds back against her. The way they’re tangled, the harsh relentless pumping of her tendrils inside him is enough to rattle all coherency out of him. The two of them twist together, desperate, and he goes “Rose, _rose_ ,” and traces her fins with shaking clumsy fingers. She pants, ragged and inelegant, so deeply that it makes her gillslits quiver against Daevit’s chest and he thinks he wants to fuck her in a bathtub or something, on the beach, anywhere, everywhere, he wants to turn her inside out and lay claim to every wet violet inch. 

He surges forward and pulls her head back by the ears so their horns click, catch, and she comes with a startlingly goofy, yelping “ _Fnnagh_!”, her nook bearing down on his bulge, her tendrils surging frantically against his seedflap, curling against the soft outer skin of his nook and his thighs and all of him caught and held and used. 

“God,” he laughs helplessly, “G—God, Rose, Ro—rose, ah-h, fuck— _really_?—” even through the overwhelming stupid animal pleasure of it all. 

“Quit it,” she pants, still shaking and electrified with climax, “I’ll show _you_ who’s god!” and grinds their horns till Daevit can feel it in his teeth. He can’t stop laughing, though, giddy and alive, and each twitch and tremble of Rose’s hips winds that hot possessive carelessness tighter, mixing with his own climax so he doesn’t quite know where to separate his feelings from the stupid roiling pleasure grounding itself between his legs, working itself out in the conjunction of their bodies and the way that she’s smiling, despite herself. 

Her tendrils are slipping from him, soft and sopping wet and making terrible squishy noises each time he rolls against her, they sound like a soundboard set to play a squelch symphony. Sex is _absurd_. She’s absurd, and he’s even worse for liking it so much. He feels like he finally understood a joke someone’s been telling him his entire life. 

She rolls him over to his back, finally, growling like a porno and he wraps his arms around her neck and kisses her hard. She tastes bitter and chemical and bites his lips too hard, but she also gets his thighs slung up around her waist and palms his fluttering, sloppy-wet nook and so yeah, okay, he likes this plan of action. He could go for some more attention. 

“Rose, please,” he gasps, “C’mon—” she complies. He’s so stretched-soft from her tendrils that her fingers slip in like nothing but she knows her way around the inside of a guy’s bits and she strokes over his quivering seedflap with merciless precision. She works him harshly, relentlessly, till he can’t kiss her anymore from all the squeaky gasping he needs his mouth for, till his head thumps back hard on the floor and he can feel his own fluids gushing down across his stomach and still she drives him through one orgasm and out the other side, till he’s shaky and mewling. “Okay,” he gasps, squirming, a weak hand to her shoulder. “Okay, tha—aht’s, nhn, Rose, that’s—I’m— _ahhhfuck, fuck, God, oh_!” She takes his bulge in her mouth and does something with her tongue that should be illegal, or maybe mandated curriculum for every schoolfeed everywhere, and still her fingers work inside of him. She makes him scream for her. He thinks vaguely that there are—she’s got three, four, he doesn’t know, he’s just desperate that she doesn’t stop. 

“This okay?” she growls, at some point, and he wails “ _Don’t stop, don’t you dare_ —” she folds her thumb in, and then—she’s—fuck, in him to the wrist, he didn’t know he could take _that_ , he didn’t know but everything’s gone tight and boiling-hot and incoherent, all his attention focussed at the aching clutch of his nook around her fist and her stretching, stroking fingers, the soft cold twine of her lips and tongue against his bulge. He thinks he’s coming—whatever he’s doing has to be coming, right? It’s just, he can’t, he’s done, it’s too much. He cries her name till his voice gives out. 

Finally, after some long breathless, heaving period of time, he gets enough breath back to unpeel from the floor a little. Just a little. He opens his eyes. That’s an accomplishment.  
She’s propped up on her elbows beside him, just looking down at him. There’s a sharp line between her eyebrows and her pupils are still too wide, even for the shadowy gloom of this unlit squat, and sweat sticks the tangle of her hair all around her face and fins. Her lips are bit-up and swollen but she’s got the lower between her sharp pink-stained teeth and she’s worrying it, looking at him. She looks like a total mess, and a really sad one, too. 

She touches one of his horns. Slowly, a finger dragged from the base to the tip, and he lets his eyes close again at the feel of her and her sweat and her weird stupid sadness. He hates her sadness, he hates her for being so sad, he hates himself for not being good enough to fix any of this, or save her from it, or—or whatever. Whatever he was supposed to be doing here. 

Whoever. Fuck. 

“I can go,” he blurts out. “I should—fuck. I should go. I’ll go. There’s all kinds of stupid history here, isn’t there, you’ve got your gig and I’ve got—we’re never going to be okay, are we—this was so _stupid_ —”

“Don’t go,” she says. 

He opens an eye, but just one this time. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Daevit. I’m—’m sorry. Okay? But just— don’t. We’ll do this properly.” You can hate me for who I really am, yeah?” She laughs, but miserably. “Sisn’t— _nisn—isn’t_! Isn’t. Isn’t that how this works?”

He flops a hand out, so it lays over one of hers, knuckles to knuckles. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t know how this works, sis. You tell me.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she repeats, and shifts a little so she can turn her hand around, and catch his fingers with her own. “We’ll make it work. Okay?”

“Yeah,” he agrees, and squeezes her hand. “Yeah, okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> *
> 
>  
> 
> _Oh you go to sleep on your own,_  
>  _And you wake each day with your thoughts_  
>  _And it scares you being alone,_  
>  _It's a last resort..._
> 
>  
> 
> Bastille - Sleepsong


End file.
